Why Bureaucrats Always Win: Modern Survivalism, Bitcoin, and the Iron Law of Institutions

Jack Spirko [00:00:00] He said the purse, the purpose of the system is what it does and there is no point in arguing about the intention of the system. So if we, if you wanna look at education again, what does the system of education in America do today? It creates people that are smart enough to pull the levers and obedient enough to follow the rules.

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] If you take a high level executive at a major corporation and you compare that person with a high level person at a small business that they started, those two people have entirely different skill sets.

Jack Spirko [00:00:33] So the person that thinks this thinking is crazy, you turn around and ask 'em. You got fire insurance on your house? Yeah. You got car insurance? Yeah. Have you ever had your house burned down or your car completely destroyed? And most people will say no. Did you eat yesterday? Yeah. You have kids? Yeah. You wanna feed them? Yeah. Do you have any food insurance? Blank stare.

Vance Crowe [00:00:58] Howdy. I am Hannah Newin Schwan, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois. And you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I am glad you are here. Today we talk to the survivalist Jack Spko. Jack is one of those people that I found because my good friend and friend of the podcast, Zach Smith, was on his podcast talking about the stock cropper and what it could do for being able to enable livestock cropping on your farm. You know, oftentimes the, the concept of being a survivalist or somebody that is preparing for the long term makes them a crazy person. But I actually really enjoyed Jack's insights. One of the things I noticed was that this was not a man frantically running around trying to gather up and hoard things as quickly as he could. Instead, he was bringing on serious experts to talk about the long term details that were required to make things like a water system work or to be able to farm in a way that actually would maintain some standard of living. I am actually really impressed with Jack and I reached out to him and was shocked when he answered my email. He has a podcast that is huge. A lot of people tune in and when you hear the guests that he has on, these are all serious people that take themselves seriously. They take the future seriously. And I am really excited to have him on. We're gonna talk about long-term versus short-term thinking and survivalism. We'll probably talk about Bitcoin and we'll talk about raising kids. I know Jack just released a podcast where he talked a lot about his grandson and his fears for the future.

Vance Crowe [00:02:30] So we'll chat about that. We're gonna get to that interview in just a second. But a long time, listeners of the podcast know that I record Legacy Interviews in this studio. This is where people hire our company to sit down with your loved ones, to record them telling their life stories so that future generations have an opportunity to know their family history. Just this week we had a couple in that was truly amazing. They were a farm couple. The dad had started off living in a house with no plumbing. He barely had electricity and he married a woman that was a CPA and they built a life for themselves. What is so amazing is that at the end of this interview, you see the couple look at each other and they realize that they've never really taken the time to go back and reflect on all the things they went through, all the really difficult times in their lives, the times when they were stressed, and maybe there was some conflict in the house, but somehow they got through it and they have now their loving marriage to show for it children and grandchildren that love them and are near them. And it is a very profound experience. Not only do you get the interview, but just the act of coming to our studio and having this as an oasis to think about your life is a deep and profound gift. If you're interested in having us sit down with your loved ones, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Jack Spko. Jack Spko, welcome to the podcast.

Jack Spirko [00:03:57] Hey man, thanks for having me on this.

Vance Crowe [00:03:59] I am, I'm I, when I first started listening to your stuff, I actually kinda ribbed Zach a little bit. I was like, man, are you sure you wanna go on a survivalist podcast? These people are nuts. They're living out in the woods, you know, storing as many guns in as much ammo as they can, but he was totally right. You are a deep thinker about this stuff. So let's talk for a moment about why did you name your podcast the Survivalist podcast, and what does it mean to be a survivalist?

Jack Spirko [00:04:24] Sure. So back in 2008, I was getting really fed up with my corporate life. I had done very well for myself, but I was in my mid thirties and it wasn't really working out the way I wanted. And I would get home and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. I was a chief operations officer of a holding company and I had ownership in about five other companies. And one of 'em was a marketing company. And we had a client who wanted a podcast and a website and a blog and all kinds of stuff. So I helped the team put together a, a bid, submitted it to the guy, he accepted it. And then my, my lead web developer, and this is 2008 podcasts were not really a thing yet. I mean, my show is six months older than no agenda. So if you think about like, the Pod Fathers podcast is only six months older than mine. So this was not something widely known from a technical standpoint. I'm like, I'll figure it out Bobby. And you just do everything else. And it turned out you like you throw an extension in WordPress and you had a podcast and you register with the podcast services. So I started doing the show in my car and as a marketing minded person, I knew what I wanted to teach. And I also knew what was kind of coming down the pike as being hot. I mean, we were coming up to the 2012 Bs. There were like, like you said, there were crazy people everywhere that thought the world was gonna end 'cause the Mayans were gonna come back and eat us or something. And Hollywood was signaling that this was gonna be something. And what I really teach, which is survivalism, and I'll get to that in a second, but what I really teach is lifestyle design. See, if you don't design your life, then society designs it for you and you get a non resilient lifestyle.

Jack Spirko [00:06:01] If you design your life, then you can design for resiliency based on your preferences, your risk, you know, your risk concerns where you live actually will change your risk. I am not worried about a blizzard. I live in north central Texas. I, I might get a big ice storm once in a while, once every three or four years, but I'm not gonna get a blizzard that keeps me snowed in for five weeks. So I'm not gonna worry about that. I can get peripheral effects of a hurricane that can cause flood. And I certainly have three months of the year where we really pay attention to the weather channel with tornadoes. If you live in Pennsylvania where I grew up, you, if you see a tornado once every five years that's even close to you, that's capable of blowing over a willow tree, you're, you're fortunate like this is. So we have these different risk tolerances and risk realities where we are. So we want to design our life. I also am financially fairly well off. If you are dead broke, your concerns may be different than mine. And your ability to design your life for that may be different. But I also knew in 2008 when no, nobody knew what a podcast was. If I called it the Lifestyle Design podcast, unless, unless you read Tim Ferriss's book, you probably weren't gonna listen. And so I sat down and I, I just kind of mapped out, well, what is this really? And I came up with the term modern survivalism. So you won't see a lot of content on my site about how to get water out of a vine in the middle of the woods because in a crisis that's not where you're going anyway. And all the people that think they are go, go try that. I mean, this goes back to like my grandfather. My grandfather was a first generation immigrant from Ukraine. Came in through Romania.

Jack Spirko [00:07:34] 'cause it wasn't even really a country called Ukraine at that time. It was a, it was a region. The, the country didn't exist. And so he, his, his immigration stuff's actually listed as Romanian and his language is listed as Romanian because the people that did stuff at Ellis Island didn't know what Ukrainian was. And they didn't understand 'em. So they said, I ship Origin Romania, Romanian. Right? So he went through World War II as a draftee. He grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. And one day I'm out rummaging like his will through his, his s shanny is like a shed. And I find these rat traps. I'm like, you could beat somebody to death. They're made out of o they're like these huge heavy, cool spray rat traps that could kill like a mink or something. And they all had holes in them. And I'm like, what are the holes for? He goes, them squirrel traps. He said, what do you mean? He said, you take a screw and you, you screw it to a tree and you bait it with peanut butter and you set it. And when a squirrel bites it, it gets it. I said, really? How'd it work? He said, good for about a year. So when people think they're gonna go out and like hunt, gather and, and do all this in the middle of a crisis, when everybody's hungry, you wear those resources out. So modern survivalism is the idea that we have abundant resources right now and we have some really great technology and that technology may fail. And having a fail safe if that tech fails, good idea. Like you have a GPS, you still know how to like use an old school map. I don't know how old you are, but like I came up at a time when I was in sales and I had to go to place set up mapsco, right?

Jack Spirko [00:09:06] You had to like, I would to save time, I would write it down the directions to all my appointments for that that week. You know? And so I wanna marry those two things together and I wanna help people design that resilient lifestyle. The whole modern survival and modern survivalism thing. I also knew as a marketer, 'cause I am a marketer, right? I wanted something I could hang my hat on. That would be a differentiator. So if you go to Google or any search engine, you put parentheses around a phrase. It's an exact max match search. So when I searched for both of those phrases, modern survival, modern survivalism back in oh eight, they didn't exist. The only examples were like, something would end with the word modern period and then survival next. Like there was nobody using those terms. So I built everything around that concept. But it's, it's really strategic lifestyle design, which is survive, right? Because if you, if you can't prepare for the things that are gonna happen in the future, and let's be clear, I know you'll ask me at some point, what do you think is gonna happen? And I'll say, well, this is what I think, but I don't know. You can't know what's gonna happen. That's the entire point. So the person that thinks this thinking is crazy, you turn around and ask 'em, you got fire insurance on your house? Well, yeah, you got car insurance. Yeah. Have you ever had your house burned down or your car completely destroyed? And most people will say, no, did you eat yesterday? Yeah. Do you have kids? Yeah. Do you wanna feed them? Yeah. Do you have any food insurance? Blank stare. And so that's kind of the angle that we come from is a strategic lifestyle design that fits what you're doing. And then we bring everything into it, man. We bring entrepreneurship, if that's your thing, side hustles, regenerative agriculture practices.

Jack Spirko [00:10:40] One, because I care about the planet, but two, because that could end up being all that you have because inputs, you know, are expensive and they get cut off. Look at what happened during the, I'll call it the pandemic and hopefully that won't get you any demerits from YouTube or anything. But like we had the, that wasn't even that big of a deal really. And, and the, and the supermarket dried up. People were, you know, clearing out everything they could get. 'cause they panicked. And I'll tell you this, when you talk about hoarding, people that slowly build up reserves don't panic. And so they're not part of the problem when the crisis hits. So I think it's been like, I wanna flip that around and make people understand, if you don't wanna be part of the problem, then you need to take responsibility to like a grown adult and lay up a reserve right now. So that's kind of the genesis and the whole mindset that we come from.

Vance Crowe [00:11:29] Yeah, I'm totally with you on the being prepared and watching what happened with Coronavirus because it wasn't that people were dying in the streets that suddenly we couldn't get pork production to work. It wasn't that, you know, truck drivers like couldn't make it into the cab of their truck to continue driving. It was that there was fear around this. And one of the biggest things that I talk about on my podcast is that the most dangerous force on earth is a human mob. And, and when you think about how large a human mob can form now with the, the technology that we have, the fear can spread so much faster and so much deeper than ever before. And so things that actually don't need to break down for structural reasons can break down entirely based on what is the mob, what is the crowd doing? And and COVID is the perfect example of that. I mean, you just watched things go completely outta stock and the inability to even keep our meat system up and running. I mean, I was talking with pork producers that were, you know, digging holes and burying pigs because they, they weren't allowed to continue the processing and people weren't able to buy 'em at the grocery store. So they were just stacking up. And that was fear not the reality. Yeah,

Jack Spirko [00:12:40] No, because the next thing that happened was a shortage. So the people that were able to hold onto their livestock did really well if they made it through that delta. And I'll put it this way, if you were managing your pigs on pasture and you can't sell any for a few months, all you do is keep managing them and they get fatter. And when the market came back around, you made more money, not less, but if you were having to buy seed every day, when you get a pig up to about harvest size and you're feeding it great, you have a very, if you can't slaughter it or do something with it, you have a very expensive pet. Right. And farming's not having pets, that's something we also have to teach people. But your comment on the mop, this is one of my favorite quotes and it's very old, it's from Polyus, from the time of the Roman Empire. And he said this that long ago, and it's still true today. The mob is easily led and may be moved by the smallest force so that its agitation have a wonderful resemblance to those of the sea.

Vance Crowe [00:13:41] Yeah. Now

Jack Spirko [00:13:42] Like that's, and that means that the people in power know this too. Like we often say that our leaders, politicians call 'em whenever you want to. Our rulers, our owners are stupid and they do a lot of stupid things, but these are not stupid. The they have an agenda and just because you think it's stupid, other you think they're stupid is because they're doing things that don't help you. Doesn't mean it doesn't help them. And so moving the mob, if you look at all of the political craziness over the last 20 years, it's all that, we'll just put this little flick out there, we'll come up with a phrase, we'll say, this guy's bad for this reason, or that guy's bad for this reason. Or We're all gonna die from the cold. And then all of a sudden we can just cause the mob to move like the Ocean Creek, this wave effect. And so we have to be very careful with that. And that's why, and I'm not an end of the world guy, right? I mean, some of the dumb stuff we're doing right now with China and Russia, hopefully the back channels are keeping that cap down. 'cause we start tossing nukes at each other. That's a different story. But what I think we have are crises that come and go. And sometimes they're micro crisis. They're very short and contained. Sometimes they're macro crisis like the Great Depression, right? World War ii, world War I, these were major in civil war in America, major disruptions in society. But I'll tell you for a fact, the time that the most wealth was built by average people in the United States of America was raked through the Great Depression. Some of the biggest brands in the world started in people's garages during the Great Depression crisis equals opportunity for the prepared. And that's, that's a mindset that everybody should develop because then when the crisis comes, if you've laid up that that reserve and you can get through it and you know you're gonna feed your kids and you're not in panic mode, then everything you see that's problem is actually an opportunity.

Jack Spirko [00:15:25] And then it's picking the right opportunity based on your resources and your ability. And if you can do that, then crises actually become, as long as you don't get taken out really great opportunities.

Vance Crowe [00:15:36] The, the opportunities came during COVID, I remember that people that had been raising cattle and had the ability to slaughter 'em, now all of a sudden the USDA wasn't sauntering up to every single transaction and saying, no, no, no, we need to get in between this. You know, a couple of, a couple of weeks ago I had a guy on named Jason Mock that had started his own slaughtering facility. And it was a, it was a brilliant way for people that are raising pasture raised animals to be able to bring, you know, meat production in. But the USDA just ran him out of the business by asking him, you know, oh, you gotta have aluminum on this back room back here, it's gonna cost you $250,000 despite the fact that you're not gonna have meat back there. And so one of the things that I think we saw in COVID was all the sudden law enforcement and all the bureaucrats, like they were hiding out in their, in their buildings and they were not coming and checking

Jack Spirko [00:16:28] Or harassing people at Walmart for not wearing a mask. They don't have time to go bother the slaughterhouse, right? And

Vance Crowe [00:16:33] So suddenly the people that had capabilities, you know, had the ability to build things, do things, they all started working together with other people. So, you know, yeah, I had developed a pretty sophisticated network of people that we were eating probably better during COVID than I did during regular life.

Jack Spirko [00:16:49] Well, and so the lines got really long for those people to the point where people were getting quotes of like two years to process cow or a pig. And so there were other things that were done. Like I interviewed a gal about a year ago, I guess named Tiffany Baxter, she's outta Oklahoma. She does full on slaughter and processing mobile. She has a, a like a giant trailer with a full, and it's, it's like state certified. She was able to get enough pre-orders to pay for most of her equipment to set this operation up. And her area of operation is fairly large, but when you look on a map, it's tiny. It's a little piece of Oklahoma. And it's like, I think northeastern Oklahoma up toward the Tulsa area, somewhere up there. Like she doesn't even go to Oklahoma City and she's making a living off this now. And that was all built amid the crisis and paid for amid the crisis. When people were like, I don't care. I got two cows, I gotta get 'em processed. My processor's telling me it's an 18 month lead time, I need this done now. So it wasn't really for the commercial market, it was more the person that raises their, you know, they raise a cow calf pair a year or something like that and they do it for their family, but they don't have the equipment or the knowledge to process. And so that's a perfect example of what you're talking about right in the middle, because somebody had the right mind. She didn't even, she wasn't even really a prepper, right? She just had the right mindset to say, okay, here's my opportunity and, and she's pretty cool. You might wanna reach out and give her on someday.

Vance Crowe [00:18:18] You know, one of the things that has struck me recently is how destabilizing it is that a lot of the narratives about the past, what is our history? Who are we? Yeah. Where did, where did the US dollar come from? How did World War II really get going? Who, who were the bad guys and the good guys? You know, I don't know if it's just a function of being in my forties and having more access to information or having more time to read, but I am definitely finding that the stories that were the core of my youth are being shattered. And there's something really unsettling about that where you start to say like, wait a second, how much of what I know happened really hap Yeah, you were one of those people that talks about it all the time. Just this last week you were talking about, you know, the lead up to World War II and, and you know, the how long it took for people to recover after the Great Depression. And these are not stories that are being taught in our schools for sure.

Jack Spirko [00:19:16] Yeah. I mean when, when I learned about the Great Depression in school, and I'm talking high school, the basic linear explanation was, well a lot of people spent a lot of money on stocks they shouldn't have. They didn't know what they're doing. They drove the market up real high. Dust bowl hit at the same time a financial crisis hit and nobody could find work. FDR came in and saved the world with a civilian conservation corps, which to be fair is probably one of the most productive government agencies that ever existed. And then World War II happened and it all ended because we went on a war economy and everything got better because war's good for the economy. And this condensed that period of time into what felt like a couple years in the mind of the learner. Well it was actually quite a long period of time even with that being the story. But the real story is stock market crashed in 1929 and it regained its previous all time high in 1963. It took till 1963 for the industry in the United States to come back to its value that previous. And that was with cheating and measuring the dollar at what, $33 to the ounce of gold versus $20 the ounce. So that means that didn't even happen. And then in 71 we decide, well, you know, Francis calling our bluff on this gold standard thing. And basically Charles Dega has declared economic warfare against the United States and they were cashing in, every dollar came under their hand of French. Nobody knows this. And this is not hidden and it's not conspiracy theories white out in the open was cashing in all the money at 71.

Jack Spirko [00:20:48] Nixon was like, we're temporarily closing the gold window.

Vance Crowe [00:20:51] Oh, even, even wilder than that. Like the, you know, truth is stranger than fiction. They were sending their boats over to pick up gold from Oh yeah, from Fort Knox. Yeah. And that's when like the, the, you know, they got the telegram, Hey, the ship is coming over. Yeah. And that's when

Jack Spirko [00:21:05] He

Vance Crowe [00:21:05] Closed off the, the gold window

Jack Spirko [00:21:07] Temporarily.

Vance Crowe [00:21:08] That's right.

Jack Spirko [00:21:08] Temporarily, right. So in 70, well if you, there's a website called what the f and I think it's the full word. I just don't know what's acceptable on your show

Vance Crowe [00:21:15] Or not. Anything is fine.

Jack Spirko [00:21:17] Okay, what the fuck happened in 1971? And you go look at the money supply and the debt and they go parabolic in 70, from 72 on after that was done. But here's the crazy part about that side, if you check it out, a number of administrators relative to doctors went parabolic, right? Debt of the average farmer went parabolic. A number of administrators in just about every industry went parabolic, cost of healthcare went parabolic, cost of tuition in in colleges went per, everything went insane. And it's because there was so much money being pumped into the casino and it was such easy access with credit that industries do what industries do, which is, it's really, people think it's like it, it's just inflation. Well it's inflation, but it's also protectionism. So big companies do something that nobody realizes. They think they have lobbyists to prevent being regulated. They have lobbyists to steer regulation. They love to be regulated. Because if I'm, let's go into Ag Bank, if I'm Tyson, the fact that every one of my slaughterhouses has to have an FDA inspector, that I have to pay their entire salary and benefits as a federal employee. And since I'm running a 24 hour system with three shifts, I gotta pay three of them. They love that. That's a big expense. It's a rounding error in that industry. But Bill, who wants to set up a slaughterhouse to handle all the local production, he can't afford it. And there's a million examples just like that.

Jack Spirko [00:22:49] And it all really, like, I'm not gonna say it started, it really started in 1913, but it, it had the gas and like a mix of gas, gas, thermite and kerosene dumped on it all at once in 71. And the big lesson from that, that no one seems to have taken from it, there's no such thing as a temporary government program. They don't exist. They don't exist.

Vance Crowe [00:23:12] Yeah. I think that with, when corporations, just, just to hit this point a little bit harder, and we'll go back to the government programs are never temporary is, yeah. So I used to work for Monsanto and I was the guy that they sent out to go talk with people that had strong feelings about GMOs and pesticides. So oftentimes I'd be talking with hardcore activists that had spent their lives fighting against Monsanto. And I would say to them, look, the tactics that you guys used to drive fear into the market, Monsanto couldn't have paid someone to do a better job for them than you guys because you made everybody afraid. So then Monsano and everybody else, that's a large corporation, b Bayer, all these other companies would come out and say, you know what, if you guys are afraid, don't worry. We'll just add five more years of testing on it's, it's gonna be $10 million a year and that's gonna be tough, but that's what we're gonna do. And what that did was it made it so it cost 50 million more dollars to be able to bring a product to market, which meant no one could do it. So if you came up with something new, the, they were sitting right there by the side of the toll road being like, well you probably don't have enough money to make it all the way through, so why don't you sell your pretty little company to us? And then, and and on and on it goes in the, in the regulatory capture world.

Jack Spirko [00:24:26] Exactly. And pharmaceutical, same blueprint, big food outside of the ag side, like food production, food ingredients, et cetera. Same blueprint. It's all like, once these people find something that works, they do it over and over again because why wouldn't you?

Vance Crowe [00:24:42] Yeah. It's not male intent. Like why were

Jack Spirko [00:24:43] You that wheel?

Vance Crowe [00:24:44] I think the thing that I I've come to the conclusion is it's not male intent, it is human nature to move into a bureaucratic state, to move into administrative state to move towards like, well let's just make it even. And, and, and instead of having waves here, let's just even it all out. Not recognizing that what you're actually doing is creating huge bubbles and then, and then explosions of those bubbles with things like monetary policy.

Jack Spirko [00:25:10] Yeah. And I, I think like one thing that leads credence to that is there was a, I can't remember who did this, the guy did a research experiment where they took a bunch of people, put 'em together to play Monopoly and they gave certain players mu more money in the beginning. And by the end of the game, of course those guys all won because the way you win monopoly is counterintuitive. You, you buy everything you can as fast as possible and you mortgage everything you can as possible fast as possible. And you put all the houses and hotels on as fast as you can. So if you start out with more money, you have an a, a huge advantage if you understand that well, all of those people ended up saying the reason that they won wasn't really the advantage they were given. It was that they, you're just better at playing the game and this is a Parker Brothers game and people still are lulled into this. So the problem is the game has a goal and the goal is die with the most money. That's the agenda. Like that's how you win the game. You die with the most money. So, and there's some people that will take that to the extreme, we call 'em sociopaths. And they end up like sociopaths are generally smarter than the average person, right? They're not the person that ends up in a jail cell. They realize like if I, if I go out and use my sociopath the wrong way, I'm gonna get locked up. So they gravitate toward positions of power. CEOs, senators, congressmen, presidents, high level bureaucrats. So you have those people who have taken the game that we've established collectively and they've taken to the extreme and they move into positions of power and then we pull into something. Have you ever heard ofs, iron law, bureaucracy?

Vance Crowe [00:26:43] No. Tell me more.

Jack Spirko [00:26:45] Jerry Porn was a kind of everyday, every man philosopher, very, very gifted gentleman got passed away quite a few years ago. And the iron law of bureaucracy is probably his best known work. And it was that in any organization you'll have two kinds of people, people dedicated to the organization itself. And people org dedicated to the mission of the organization. So in the world of education, you have the teachers in the classroom that like they got their degree in education so they could shake the minds of the young and help the future. And then you have people that maybe they even entered that way, but really quickly they're like, department of education is sweet, right? And they become dedicated to the organization and across time, and this can be in agriculture, it can, it can be anywhere cross time. If there's a large enough entity that's in control, the people dedicated to the entity will always be the ones that move to the top of the organization. And the people that are dedicated to the mission will always end up subject to their rules, regulations, controls. And therefore the mission will always fail and the bureaucrats will always win. And this is an iron law that cannot be broken. And I think there's a lot of things like that that once you accept those things, everything starts to make a hell of a lot more sense. Right? Another guy that I always liked was Stanford beer. And one of the things he, he is a systems thinker and he said pers the purpose of the system is what it does. And there is no point in arguing about the intention of the system. So if we, if you wanna look at education again, what does the system of education in America do today?

Jack Spirko [00:28:21] It creates people that are smart enough to pull the levers and obedient enough to follow the rules and dedicated to wherever they end up in it, to a siloed specialty and to defending that no matter what. And that furthers the goal of the state and the industry. So that's the purpose, but it's about making sure every, I don't care what you think it's about what, what comes out at the end is the purpose of the system. Because if it wasn't somebody in charge would've started to change it a long time ago. 'cause it's run that way since 1880s. Right? So it was designed to do exactly what it's doing and then when you sit there and look at it and you can't, like as soon as you accept that, you go no. Okay. So that means if I have children that I really care about, I either need to guide them through that system if I can't get 'em out of it or I need to remove them from it, but I can't trust it. And there's a ton of things like that, that once you accept them, then you look at the world differently and you develop pattern recognition. And in a discipline of permaculture, which is something I've been involved with since about 2008, that's one of the key principles of permaculture is being able to identify a pattern. Once I see the pattern, which is exactly what they do, they see the pattern regulatory capture works, we're gonna do that too. But you can use, it's a power. So you can use it for good or evil depending on how you look at it, I guess.

Vance Crowe [00:29:39] Yeah. I was reading a thing on X and somebody posted Sane Grain posted this conversation they were having about how if you take a high level executive at a major corporation and you compare that person with a high level person at a small business that they started, those two people have entirely different skillset. Absolutely. And it has figured out how to maneuver through that bureaucratic system. And they don't want anyone necessarily to love them. They just wanna be not disliked enough to ever be shot When, when, you know, inevitably corporations have downturns. So the people that rise to the top of those corporations are charismatic but not too charismatic. They, they, you know, try and make some things happen but not very much. Whereas a small business, they don't have time for that. It is all about meritocracy. If you don't continue to have cash flow come in, then the business fails and you're gone. And the challenge is, the system of a bureaucracy easily passes that down. If you don't like the cog that's there, he ages out the, the corporation can continue. Whereas in a small to middle sized company, if the, once the CEO is gone, that was the guy that really figured out how to make things work. And so succession planning is infinitely important but also extremely expensive for the person doing the, the small to middle size company.

Jack Spirko [00:30:59] Yeah, definitely. When we were building all these companies back in the two thousands, every one of our senior people we had key man insurance on, right? And then we had like one of our companies was doing analysis, high level analysis for cellular carriers basically to be able to look at their networks and say, this is where you need to make your capital investment and this is where you think you do. And you can wait another six months and six months of deferral on, you know, $30 billion worth of capital is a hell of a savings. So we were able to predict that. Now the, the, the PhD math guy that was really the brains behind the algorithms that did that work, we had key man insurance on him. IBM does not have key man insurance on anybody. They don't care. Like they have a, they have shark's tooth model, this guy pops out, another one pops in, no problem whatsoever. And that's just a one example of that mindset. I had the company, so I was in the holding company, but you're only taking distributions based on profits. And I was actually running the marketing company as the president of that company and there was a point where we all sat down and went, we gotta take money out of that company. We had to take money outta all 'em, we had to take it out of that company I was running. I took a hundred percent of the hit for my people. You think a CEO of IBM or Apple's gonna do that take a hundred percent. Like or a president of a department? No, they're not gonna do that. I did that because it was a baby company that couldn't afford to lose the good people that I had worked my ass off to bring in. This is a totally different mindset you're talking about.

Jack Spirko [00:32:30] And you know, I also cared about it 'cause I built it from nothing. Right? And you know, IBM probably had a point in time where it was sort of that way, but sometimes things grow to a point where they become bureaucracies and then that iron law comes in.

Vance Crowe [00:32:45] So one of the things that I started doing with Legacy Interviews, 'cause I actually had somebody call me up and ask if we would do it, is we do retirement Legacy Interviews where somebody gets a gift and they, they get to do their own personal conversation about their own life and their childhood and their career. But then they do a smaller segment about an hour and a half on the business and you realize just how difficult it would be to pass down all that learned, you know, earned wisdom that you have to run that company because you're sitting there and, and they're saying, you know, I've never actually thought about why that business grew up in the way that it did. Let, let me explain it as best I can. And you realize that if you don't take the time to sit down and, and categorize or, or, or write it out or give some way to pass that down, it's so you're the next generation won't know. They'll, they'll come into a business and not know how the business got the way that it is.

Jack Spirko [00:33:38] I, I'm really glad you're doing that. I didn't know you did that. And I think it's really important. And I think about the few things like that that happened long ago to give us a window back into like the 18 hundreds. I listened to this thing I probably six months ago on YouTube. It was a gentleman being interviewed. He was very elderly. He was the middle of the 1930s and he had started his career when he was 14 years old as like a runner for some printing company or something. I don't remember exactly what they did. And it was like right around the time of the Civil War that he got this gig, like his dad like stuck him into the, like made a deal with a guy that was in the company to get him in as a runner and he retired as the president of the company right now talk about wisdom kid that comes in as a runner and ends up running the company. And then, you know, my father-in-law, this is not that long, this is like the fifties and sixties my father-in-law's passed away. Now he did pretty much the same thing. He ended up working for like a regional dairy that did like little stores like back when we actually had regular agriculture in the United States still. And he went in basically he was like, you know, it'll be like working at Brahms or McDonald's today, except it was more like a little supermarket than a fast food place. He ended up leaving that company eventually 'cause he wanted to move, but he was the vice president of the company, right? So that used to be standard practice in our society because you recognize that this person that came in the door at the absolute bottom, if they could progress through that on merit, not based on political wrangling, that that was the person you wanted to lead things.

Jack Spirko [00:35:11] We also used to have a a time when, you know, I was in sales before I started building my own companies. And that's why I started building my own companies. Because every time you start to make a ton of money in sales, they change your compensation plan,

Vance Crowe [00:35:22] Right?

Jack Spirko [00:35:22] When I ran companies, the bigger check that I signed for a salesperson, the bigger my smile was. Right? Because I was worried about my company making a profit and paying everybody well,

Vance Crowe [00:35:32] Oh, and finding somebody that can do sales. Well,

Jack Spirko [00:35:34] Corporation, if you're a corporation and you miss your, not, you make a ton of money, but you miss your earnings expectation by 0.1%. Wall Street punishes you, right? If you're a public convict, right? So that's another place that things really shift over. I know we're supposed to be talking about survivalism, but this understanding where you're living, that's survivalism. And when a company goes from pri private to public, everything changes because they become subject to the whims of investors. They become vulnerable to people that short markets, they become vulnerable to hedge funds. Like you look into stress and you're like a like up on the grid with a target lock by every hedge fund out there. Let's go get this company while we can. Or companies like, like I've been through acquisitions too. I worked for a company called Micro Test for a while and a company called Fluke bought us. But Fluke didn't buy us. Danaher, who was a multi-billion dollar corporation that owned like 20 other companies like us, bought us and folded us into Fluke. And we went from a 570 comp 570 employee company that ran exceptionally well. Well of us made it one quarter after the buyout, right? So that's, you know, almost 600 people that were good people lost their jobs because in that world they were redundant. Where in our world they were, you know, They were incredibly important. If we had, if that company had never gone public, would've never happened. If we had been a private entity, they would've never bought us out. But because we were public, they were able to just put up enough cash that the shareholders that realized, well we can make an extra $9 a share rate now done shareholder approval and out the door.

Vance Crowe [00:37:13] So you were mentioning about people coming up the, the in in shipping, they call it coming up the hos pipe, right? Where you start off as just a, you know, the the lowest guy scrubbing decks and then eventually you can move your way up to being a, a captain or a, or an officer in some way. And that's something that I think changed when we started making all these HR laws, which is one of the things that helped corrode our society the fastest. Because now the company had to have a justification why this person got paid this much and that person got paid that much. And we can't be honest with them. 'cause if you're too honest with them, they'll sue you. And what I've discovered from doing these Legacy Interviews is that, you know, if dad came up the, the the hard way, you know, he started off working for somebody else on their farm and came up. He's got stories about when he failed. Yes. And those failure stories are not ones that he's sitting around being like, come on Junior, let me come tell you how I failed. But you need those stories because we're living in a world where young people, I think are afraid to fail because they look out at the world and say, Hey, there's no, you know, that you, you either succeed all the way up, there's no failure or, or you know, or you crash and burn. But the reality is, if you came up the hard way, you screwed up. You showed up to work one night after drinking too much and you got fired. Or you, you know, trusted somebody that your wife told you not to trust and you got burned and it cost you, you know, five, 10 years to come back from that business deal, whatever that is. But those stories, not of how you succeeded, but of how you failed are the most important ones to get out of your loved ones.

Vance Crowe [00:38:51] And we just don't live, we live in such a fast-paced society that I don't think most people get those stories out of their, out of their parents.

Jack Spirko [00:38:59] Yeah. There's a song, it's either by Mike and the Mechanics or Don Henley, I can't remember which one 'cause they have such a similar vocal thing, but I think it's called In the Living Years. And there's a line and it says every generation blames the one before. But you should explain why. Because every generation tells the next generation about all their accomplishments. And then the young, young generation goes out and struggles and says, it must be their fault. 'cause it was easy for them. And I say this all the time on the show 'cause I have a lot of young listeners, late teens, early twenties, and they're always bitching about how they're broken off. You're supposed to be, it's supposed to suck. I promise you. You know, I got outta the army in 1993. I packed up a little $400 car I bought with cash. I drove down here to the Dallas area of Texas and no one gave a shit that I served in the military at that point. It didn't matter until I had experience and then it mattered. Right? It's kinda like a college degree. Oh, you, you know, you were army and you were corporal and you know, you had this leadership training. But when you go in for like a first job outta the military, nobody cares. Right? What, what would you do? What'd you do now? I was a mechanic. Do you wanna be a mechanic? No. Okay. No, we really don't care. Right. So like, you know, my genesis story down here was I got about 20 miles from my friend's house I was gonna stay with. And my car broke down on the side of 6 35. I had to push it off the road. My first job I worked for $5 and 90 cents an hour packing boxes in a warehouse. Right? And it, it, it, it, it was a struggle. And along the way I got great opportunities and some of 'em I screwed up and some of 'em just fell out from underneath me. And it took a lot of work. When I, when I went from sales to marketing, before I went into building my own companies doing it, I knew that I needed to know more.

Jack Spirko [00:40:35] So I went from making 200 grand a year to making 45 grand a year so I could get a job in marketing and be surrounded by marketing people that did marketing every day. And if you're not willing to share that with the people that you're trying to lead to the level of success you had, hopefully have 'em exceed it, then they're not gonna get there because they don't have resiliency because they're either gonna feel totally depressed and think it's their fault. But more likely in a society where it's everybody's fault, but mine, well it must be somebody's fault. So the boomer's stalled it. Right? The boom. Like you hear this, you ever heard this one? Well the boomers, when the boomers were coming up, one person could work and the other one could stay home. Yeah. Then why is Gen X the latchkey kids? You realize how ridiculous that statement is. Back to when the boomers were in their crime and raising their children. Mom stayed home. There wouldn't have been a generation Gen X latchkey kids if that was the case. 'cause mom would've been home. But we were the kids that came on and took care of ourselves. 'cause not we wanted to, we had to. I I'm actually grateful for it personally. But

Vance Crowe [00:41:35] There is something that's changed though. I mean, I think that, I mean I believe that the most, I don't know if the word is pernicious, like the, the worst thing that the government does is inflate our money. That is like, it's correct. It's absolute and blatant theft. And I, I see people out on LinkedIn, you know, trying to talk about how it's really not that bad. We need to do this for the economy. These people are insane. But the value of the, the work that you are Storing in your money and people always talk like, you know, Bitcoin is not a store of value. Oh really? Well the, the dollar has lost 25% of its spending capacity in the last four years. And what has happened is all this work that people were able to store in, in their savings account, putting it into a bank after they'd earned it, is now not there. Now you have to risk it. You have to go gamble it in the market. And so what people used to be able to do with that money was have mom be at home and handle the, the home economics. The the, actually this a, this is a great thing to talk about home economics. Now I used to have this impression that this was us funneling women into this. Like, you gotta go be a mom and you're, you're not smart enough to learn how to be a, you know, an accountant or a whatever. The reality was, home economics was deeply valuable to people. It taught women how to make clothes. It taught them how to manage a family budget, which is not intuitive. It taught, it taught you how to do all these things. And I'm not saying I want the public school teaching these things, but we so skewed this as something we were teaching people that that's why in in the homes, we don't have people that know how to run 'em, how to manage 'em

Jack Spirko [00:43:10] Well definitely in the education space, there's been a shift in that. I, I took home economics in high school 'cause it was all girls.

Vance Crowe [00:43:17] When

Jack Spirko [00:43:18] You're a 15-year-old kid and they tell you can take a class or you're gonna be surrounded by 30 girls, you're like, and you get to cook food and eat. And if I don't pass it, it doesn't even matter. I'm in baby. Right? So we had that and I'm, you know, I'm an eighties kid. I had industrial arts, I learned metal work, I learned woodwork in school. When I got into high school, I took a business curriculum path. I had business lock courses in school. I had accounting level, I had college level accounting. By my junior year in high school. I was able, I don't, I never went to college, but I have a few college credit hours. 'cause I was able to clipp out an entry level college accounting course from high school in rural Pennsylvania. Like we've stripped all that out. We, we, we mock these young people. 'cause they don't know how to do anything. It's our job to teach them. It's our job to teach 'em. And I think what happened is my generation, we learned a lot of that stuff in school if we had an interest in it. So we just figured, well our kids would learn it and they learned a lot less of it. And then, you know, you, you get into like gen alpha, gen Z right now, and they're not learning anything like that in school. They're, they're learning that, that they can pick their own gender when they're in second grade. You know? And that's not like my main line issue, but it does disgust me. And I don't know people that could get their kids outta school that haven't yet. If that's not gonna do it, I don't know. What are you, what are you waiting for? Because, you know, we run, we run a homeschool program for our chil our grandchildren here in my home.

Jack Spirko [00:44:49] They live with their parents. We just simply have them here during the day and then they go back to mom and dad so that mom and dad can work. I'm a podcaster. I work from home. I've done that for 16 years. My wife's basically retired. So we're able to do that for, we use a program called to sell Us. And they are excelling, they are thriving on this because they're able to, and they're spending two hours a day doing their school, which frees up their childhood for exploration for the rest of the day. So my other thing I tell people is why does that school have your kid for nine hours a day, including the commute back and forth on a bus or whatever. They get home and they have two to three hours worth of homework. What are they doing to your kids if they're not getting sufficient work done while they're in school to learn? When my kids would, would whoop your ass in a standardized test. I promise you that right now. And they're only spending two hours a day on it. They never have a good answer. They have some sort of excuse about you don't know what it's like. Well, I do have, I don't have an excuse, I have a reason. It's because the primary purpose of school is training, not teaching. We are training obedience. We are training conformity. You wanna get straight A's in school, do everything you're told. You probably will, even if you're not that smart. If you do every assignment when you're told on time and do everything a teacher says, you'll probably come out with a's if not a's a's and B's unless you're like, like if you're IQ 60, that's a different story. But if you have a reasonable level of human intelligence, there is nothing you're asked to do in school that you can't do. The kids that get lowered rates, they're not dumb. In general. There are some, I'm gonna be honest, there's some dumb people in the world.

Jack Spirko [00:46:22] You know, 'em, you've met 'em, but in general they're non-conformists. Right. So what's the purpose of the system? Create conformity. Like, and, and this is just our entire society's built on this. And that's why you could scare people so easily with a really bad cold. Right. And if people get mad during the pandemic, if you got really mad at me about that, I'm like, prove me wrong. Well, some people died, well, some people die of the flu in the cold every year, especially 88-year-old people with COPD and nine comorbidities. Like if we take that out of that, this was, this was a bad flu season, a really bad one, but a bad flu season. We didn't need to shut society down for this. Why did they shut society down? Not because they wanted to. Even though they did, they shut society down because we allowed it. We allowed it. If people would've just said no, and I don't mean one or two people here and there. And that's often important, can get a movement going. But we, we were so weakened by that point that one or two people here and there were not enough. And they made examples of

Vance Crowe [00:47:22] What do you, what do you they went after me. What do you keep coming out of it? Like I, I am a highly disagreeable person. So when, when people were putting, saying you have to put masks on, you know, there was a period of time where I said, I don't really know if this is gonna help or not, maybe I can help out here. But as soon as I started to realize this is, this is something different than helping, then I'm not wearing the mask and I'll never do it again. Right. Like e you know, e even in the face of, of it being bad for me health wise, I likely would not do it again. Are there more people that were grown up that are now because they saw it or that are rebellious or are there less people, more compliance and will it be easier the next time something happens?

Jack Spirko [00:48:03] I'm not sure, but I think it's the first. I think that people are more resistant to this if they feel like they're trying to do pandemic 2.0 with this BS about bird flu, going through a cow killing a guy in Mexico who apparently was on death's door for eight weeks before he ended up in the hospital dead. And it doesn't seem like they're getting any traction. And so they shift gears in the news cycle to something else. It feels like people will be more resistant to it. I was a complete ass right from the beginning as far as society was concerned when they did all the masking directives and all, and we had less tightness on that in Texas than a lot of the country. But I would go into stores and I just wouldn't wear a mask. And I'm like, I don't think the guy that may save dollars an hour to say welcome to Walmart is gonna stop me. I don't think they're gonna run down and tackle me. And if they wanna arrest me for that, I got money. I'll bail myself out. We'll see how it goes. And so my, my compliance was limited to where can I not get away with it. So when you got to the register and you had to pay for your stuff and they said, put your mask on. I carry a gator 'cause I use 'em for fishing anyway, to keep from getting sunburned. I pull a gator outta my pocket, put it on pay, and immediately take it off. And that was a place I did see like one person make a difference. Like I'd be walking around a store without a mask on and you start seeing people look and they realize like, alighting bolts didn't strike that dude. And you start seeing them, oh, I used to jump around left and right. You, I

Vance Crowe [00:49:23] Would go to the store and you'd see that guy that's like wearing a baseball cap and he clearly doesn't wanna be, and he's maybe with his girlfriend and he sees me walking around and he was like, you know what, there's another guy here.

Jack Spirko [00:49:34] Oh God. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:49:35] And so you, there's definitely some of that. I think one of the things that surprised me out of COVID was a lot of the communities that people thought would rally together, you know, my parents hardcore Catholic every single Sunday they're going there. Yeah. You know, they suspended all that. And once you didn't have that community coming together in physical space, now a lot of those people were older. My dad's 80 years older.

Jack Spirko [00:49:59] Why do you think they did it? Yeah. Do you think, why do you think they

Vance Crowe [00:50:02] Do think is actually as, as coordinated or planned? I as, as people saying, Hey, let's get them to not go to church so that way they will be more cooperative. Or is this just the natural, intuitive way that human beings shut things down?

Jack Spirko [00:50:18] I think it's both. I think that the inclination was that most of the elected leaders that had any pushback on this, and, and I don't like to be fair to any elected leader 'cause I, I don't like any of 'em, but Greg Abbott to his credit, did at least push back on his advice. But what he said when he initially did some of these restrictions is, I could not find one expert to tell me to do something else. And I'm like, well, there's a lot of 'em out there. But apparently access to the governor's control. And I think that we have this mindset that some of these things that we think of as conspiracies require a great deal of cooperation. Well, if you have a few people that can set things in motion like the, the, the marbles of the sea through the crowd and you know how the system works and you control who gets in the ear of the leader, which isn't that hard, you know, 50 states, 50 governors, right? And the governors had more power than anybody else in this. It's actually not that hard to get in that direction. And I think what ends up happening is, well, we have to shut down everything. The churches, you have those too. But then there's also the point where they go realize if we keep people apart, then we get more control. Because when they get together, I mean the entire American Revolution was born in bar rooms and, and, and, and Winehouses, right? Like that's where like when you get people

Vance Crowe [00:51:37] Together by people in their twenties, by, by teenagers,

Jack Spirko [00:51:39] By people in their

Vance Crowe [00:51:40] Twenties, by people, teenagers and 20 year olds. Something. It wasn't a bunch of 40 year olds. It certainly was a bunch of 80 year olds

Jack Spirko [00:51:45] We're 17-year-old lieutenants and captains in the American Revolution. 17 year olds who were leading companies of men

Vance Crowe [00:51:53] To their death, right? Yeah.

Jack Spirko [00:51:55] To their death. And if they were in, if they weren't in the, the continental, if they were in the militia, that 17-year-old was running that group because he was elected by the 30-year-old men that were fighting along a side. And they recognized this is the, this is the guy that we want at the front of the, of, of, of the, of the, the tip of the spear. Right? Yeah. I I but I do think there was eventually like this realization, 'cause there is a cabal that I don't think controls the world very much desires to. And I think it's made up of different pieces and parts. 'cause the world's a big place. But like the World Economic Forum had their thumb on that scale when they had no business having their thumb on that scale.

Vance Crowe [00:52:34] Yeah. I, when I was at Monsanto, I had the chance to, to go to like the Aspen Ideas Festival and the, the just various things that they were doing at the big corporate level. And it was fascinating to me. I've, I've always disdained PR companies 'cause I went to school in college and I was like, what am I gonna study? Well, I really like people. I like communications. I'll go study public relations. What I didn't understand was that you're becoming a propaganda officer. You, you are, you're the ministry of propaganda. Of course you. But so I left it and when I got done with college, I was like, oh, I'm gonna go be a deckhand or I'm gonna go, you know, live in Africa. Yeah. I'm gonna go do these other things. But I eventually came back to it. And the Monsanto job was fascinating to me when I went to the Aspen Ideas Festival, I, I began to realize that things like the Aspen Ideas Festival, Davos, world Economic Forum, any of these things, they're actually being run by the PR companies. People have no idea how massively powerful these PR companies are and, and advertising firms. They control the money that goes to what are we advertising, which newspapers stay in print, which, you know, cable news television gets access to people that are, that are important. I think that the, one of the most shocking things for me is that the, i it's my hypothesis that college party girls rule the world. And it is that, that it's all about who, who is in these PR firms telling the leaders what they should do to be cool, to gather more power. And it's, it's, it's paradoxical in people's understanding of who runs the world.

Vance Crowe [00:54:07] I, I think it's PR firms.

Jack Spirko [00:54:09] I think it's a big part of it. I mean it, I I said this back in oh eight on the air. 'cause I was in a world, I have overlap. I didn't quit my job and do the podcast. I did a podcast for 18 months and then sold out my shares to my partners for a fraction of their worth. 'cause I wanted to lean, leave clean. But I said very early on that there was a meeting in about 2005 of all the major Madison Avenue marketing firms and, and the PR firms. And they decided at that point that the smartest thing they could do was bring all the brand messaging down to the fourth grade level. And it sounded really stupid at the time. Go look at your TV right now and tell me I'm wrong. Go watch commercials on television right now. Go watch a fat overweight woman. And I'm not picking, I'm not fat shaming, just fat overweight woman dance to a show tune telling you about lowering your A1C and tell me it's not the fourth grade level while she brings in like sub sandwiches and shit from DoorDash for everybody in the office. And you think that that that that fricking advertisement and if you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Right? Like over time it was easy to see I'm lowering my A1C and it's showing like a Broadway show tune and everybody's like line dancing to it. Do you think that's really to sell whatever ozempic? It's not an ozempic, it's something else. It's another one of these GLP ones. It's not to do that. It's to it's money law. I'm gonna put so much money into this network that its news will never say a damn word about me.

Jack Spirko [00:55:44] That's what it is. And that's, that's your same thing. And if you want college party girls, how did was Oxycontin become the number one pharmaceutical in America? It was a bunch of pretty girls right outta college.

Vance Crowe [00:55:58] Just like the Red Bull salesman, right? They show up at the bars and say, look, I'm, I'm beautiful. Come, come do shots with me.

Jack Spirko [00:56:05] It was so, it was so bad. It was almost being run like madams, running gerts. Like they'd bring a girl in and the one that did really, really good, they would recruit and put girls under her and they would have like, they would have these huge apartments because they were making so much money and be driving Porsches. And they would take the new girl and have her be a roommate of like, who was acting like the madam of the cell for like a few months until she came up to speed and get her own place. And they just kept repeating this over and over again. They were giving out little, little puffy dos that looked like a pill with a smile on its face. And they created the entire opioid crisis that we have right now. And all they did was get one guy in the FDA to finally okay, what they were doing. And they said, and this was the, this was the pitch that they did, which is fourth grade level. 'cause anybody that thinks about this, like you only believe this 'cause you want to, if you actually have pain and you take an opioid, you won't get addicted. That one concept is how we have the opioid crisis we do today because it all started coming outta Purdue Pharmaceutical. And that was the lie. And once they got it approved and they got that lie signed off on, they could market that lie. Doctors told their patients, dude's wearing a white coat with a stethoscope. You believe anything he says you're in back pain for real. But the idea that you will not get addicted to a, a controlled substance just because you actually have pain is one of the most preposterous things in the world. Fourth grade level marketing outta your Madison Avenue PR firms,

Vance Crowe [00:57:32] You're dead off. Okay. As long as we're going down here, let's, let's go even further on the edge here.

Jack Spirko [00:57:36] What are your thoughts

Vance Crowe [00:57:37] On hormonal birth control?

Jack Spirko [00:57:41] I can't tell you much about it 'cause I don't know that much of it. That's, that's not a rabbit hole I've crawled into. Well, once you

Vance Crowe [00:57:48] Start, you're gonna see that this, like in my, from my opinion, this is yeah. Such a radical change in our culture that just passed us right by it was sold Yeah.

Jack Spirko [00:57:58] To

Vance Crowe [00:57:58] 15-year-old girls that hey, you're gonna be able to clean up your acne and by the way, you'll get more regular on your cycle if your period is hard. Okay, you can do this, right? Oh, and parents, you know, God forbid your children are gonna have sex. You can't stop 'em better to block this than, than to have them get pregnant. Well, you're pumping them with actual hormones. This is and they're synthetic hormones. Yeah. That these women are now changing what they're, they're the, the experience that they have in the world, the emotionally controlled element of their body happens through hormones. And when I looked into it, one of the most staggering things, so women have a really acute sense of smell and there are women that were on hormonal birth control that when they got off it because they wanted to get pregnant, they all of a sudden couldn't stand the smell of their spouse. Right. And this is something that would've been prevented 'cause they just wouldn't have dated them. They wouldn't have been attracted to 'em and, and or

Jack Spirko [00:58:54] They would've never noticed it as a problem in the first place. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:58:57] And so I think that this, like we introduced this and then we start seeing that, you know, when their women are now in their forties and fifties now they're on Xanax or other kinds of SSRIs. I think that so much of this started when girls were 15. I'm not saying there's not a reason for birth control. I'm not saying no,

Jack Spirko [00:59:15] I'm not either.

Vance Crowe [00:59:16] You shouldn't be allowed to have it. I just think that exactly your point of this fourth grade understanding of how this stuff works. There is no way you can make the case that this was not going to have really big impacts on the individual and then subsequently on the larger culture.

Jack Spirko [00:59:32] And then at the same time, we've taught females to defer having children as late in life as possible. That's led to a population collapse. And I think hormones in of itself is a huge part of our problem. I am very much a carnivorous eater, keto more than carnivore I guess, but I eat like 90% of my calories come from beef, chicken, pork. Five years ago I weighed 75 more pounds than I do the only, i I eat more calories now than I did then. The only thing that changed is hormones. And if anybody doubts that, here's a real easy way to understand it. If I take two kids at seven years of age, about the same heights and I silhouette them from behind. So you can't see any features. You see a black silhouette against a screen. And once the boy on wants a girl and I say, tell me which one's which, most people you know, unless there's like hair or something, you would not be able to tell a difference at 14. I do the same experiment, make sure the boy and the girl are the same heights. So you don't get a, an inkling just this person's bigger and everybody's like, boy girl. Instantly, instantly, if I'm insane and I put the girl on puberty blockers and give her testosterone at seven until she's 14, and I do with the same with the boy, you'll pick the wrong one. Okay. What told the body to put a little bit more fat on the butt and a little bit more fat into the breast? Was it the food they ate? Was it the hot, maybe the hot dogs probably full of hormones too. But in general, what did it was the hormones. When we eat this industrial food diet, we throw our hormone, our endocrine system completely outta whack.

Jack Spirko [01:01:10] Primarily our regulation and production of insulin, which is, people say that thyroid is a master hormone, really insulin is a master hormone 'cause take it away and you're dead. So we throw the insulin glucagon cycle completely outta whack. And we wonder why everybody's sick now. And then you, you just add to, you'll eat more. The reason a restaurant puts a pot, a a a basket of bread or chips on your plate is you gorge on, you say you're gonna eat less, but what actually happens is you get this rapid spike and this rapid collapse and then your body wants to regulate back up to that. It's a drug. Sugar's a drug, it wants to regulate itself back up there. Especially if you combine it with fat. Let me ask you this, let's go back 10,000 plus years and you're, you're living off the land. Where are you gonna find high carbohydrate and high fat together at the same time of year? You know, once in a blue moon maybe like, I don't know if the berries are there when the salmon run, maybe, but in general you're gonna have an abundance of one or the other. You, and if you're not in the tropics or some with figs, you're not gonna ever have a real abundance of carbohydrate society. Largely was carnivorous humans involved as carnivores. This is very controversial. But if you go back and actually do the anthropological research, which I have, you'll find that the number one thing that people ate in the initial settlements, and this'll make perfect sense once you think about it, was shellfish. Let's go back before we pissed in all the rivers and creeks and crap in them, right?

Jack Spirko [01:02:41] Let's go back where everything's clean. And you could go to any fresh running, fresh body of running water, any coastal environment and you could get oysters and clams or whatever. And you had an abundance of fat and protein in one place. It couldn't run away. All you had to do is walk out, pick it up, set it on fire and pop open for you and you could eat it. Let's be honest, the first person ate an oyster was a brave man. The second one just followed along, right? Like I, I can't imagine being the first person you crack an oyster open and go yummy. But once you see somebody else do it, you try it. Maybe you dig up a little horse radish and throw it on there, you're good to go. And this thing's don't away. And if you look into early history in North America, you will find like in Florida, Ohio, all these places, these giant mounds and they'll find like a dude buried in there or something if they dig deep enough and they think, well that's why they did it. No, it's all shells. It's all shell. Because when you eat that you have a, a society of even let's say a couple hundred people and you're primarily living off shellfish. Well, you gotta do something with it. You're not gonna grind it up in a factory or something doesn't exist yet. So they would throw them in these piles and once the pile built up to a a level, they'd say, well the king died, throw his ass in there and you cover it over with dirt and these things are all over our country.

Vance Crowe [01:03:54] Well that's, that's Marco Island, right? That that all of Marco Island, all of those mango gr mangroves, all all throughout there are built on exactly what you're describing. But I had never put these two things together. That's, that's a Yep.

Jack Spirko [01:04:06] You

Vance Crowe [01:04:06] Know,

Jack Spirko [01:04:07] Well you're talking about my favorite place in the world by the way. We, we have a, a tradition of vacationing on Sanibel because I grew up in between Jacksonville, Florida and rural Pennsylvania. And my grandmother used to take me to Sanibel to become a family tradition. So I know exactly the ecosystem you're talking about. And is it not one of the most beautiful and productive ecosystems on the planet? Those, those estuary mangrove systems Until what, until we started growing frigging sugar cane in the Everglades and they took the last, the Kuch river and a one that goes out to the Atlantic the last couple miles on both sides. And they basically cemented them in a straight line right into Okeechobee. And we cut off the filter, right? Like this, we a lot of point in all this is that we're killing ourselves all over the place and no, and, and everybody else talking about carbon. Let's put the carbon in the soil where it belongs to stop worrying about it. Instead we're making sure the carbon can't go in the soil. And what they did in Okeechobee was, so Okeechobee is basically a giant puddle, it's a huge lake, but most of it's about four foot deeper, less. It's just this giant put And the way it drained until we messed with it is it had to go through the Everglades like a giant biofilter, which is what it was. And when we straightened it out and we let that water, when rains comes just go pouring out there and it runs right through res. And here's what's happening there. I dunno if you know this or not. The residents that are doing all the TruGreen Kem law on all these owls that were built there are pointing at the sugar cane people and the sugar cane. People are pointing at the lawn care people. Well, you both did it.

Jack Spirko [01:05:38] You both did it. And so now this beautiful, and this is personal to me because I love this place. I've been going there since the seventies to tell you how much I love it. And we still go all the time. And you get these fish kills where you get these red tides and it's exactly where it comes from. And you walk this beach and there's Goliath grouper that are six foot long dozen of them laying rotten dead on the side. And we go, gee, I don't know why people aren't healthy. Like this is where your food's coming from. All this, all this toxin goes into the air. I mean, you know, the problems of agriculture, the biggest polluter on the planet is agriculture. It also feeds the planet. So we're in a, like a British would say, a sticky wicked, right? Like we have to come off that, but we can't do it overnight.

Vance Crowe [01:06:25] Yeah. And we'd be a lot better off if we didn't, if we didn't have a government that was largely using agriculture to continue to put money into the lar the larger system. Because I mean a lot of where new money enters the system is through agriculture. You know, these, the, these ethanol, you know, subsidies, the, the, the way that crop insurance works. Like this is a way for the government to, and I'm sure this is just the one that I know about, but there's, I'm sure there's a lot more of that going on. I I actually wanna change gears while I still have you. Yep. Do do, are you, are you good to go a little long today?

Jack Spirko [01:06:58] We're good. Great.

Vance Crowe [01:06:59] We're good. So one of the things that I think is very interesting about you, now that I've listened to your podcast quite a bit, I understand you've got some tech savvy, but you are interested in Bitcoin and you're living in Texas and I think a lot of people think Bitcoin is kind of a techno haven. But, but from my perspective, Bitcoin is a long-term store of value and will be very valuable if we have a, you know, either a, a slow degrading of our society or an instant collapse. Where are you at on Bitcoin? How did you come to it and when, when did you start becoming, you know, a somebody that had competence in it?

Jack Spirko [01:07:38] So for as many people in my audience that thanked me daily, that I got them into Bitcoin early, I have to say it's also the audience that brought it to me. So it was about 2010 people kept telling me about this Bitcoin thing. And, and I, like most people, I didn't get it 'cause it didn't make sense. And back then it really didn't make sense. It was only about a year old really. It, it was created in oh eight, but it really started to do something in, in 2009. And it was about 2012 that I started buying some. And it was about 2013, I started telling people it. And what I came to understand across time is it's exactly, we, it's a store of value, but what it really is, is a store of energy secured by energy. So when people say Bitcoin is backed by nothing, well it's backed by the most powerful, largest and most secure network that humans have ever built in a totally decentralized manner that can't be stopped. That allows me to send you value in a way where, you know, it cannot be counterfeited in a permissionless and borderless environment. If you say that's backed by nothing, you didn't hear or understand a word I said 'cause you didn't want to, we call that willful ignorance. And that's not an insult because I was willfully ignorant of it too. It took me a while to figure that out. Like that's the most concise definition after being involved with this for about 13 years. So I can come up with that. It, that's, that's what it really is. It's the ultimate storage of value because it's the ultimate storage of energy required to produce the value. And why do you think gold is worth something? They'll say it's a limited supply, but if it was a limited supply all sitting in one place and anybody could just walk up and grab a piece so that it wouldn't be a big deal, it became money because it took a tremendous amount of energy to remove it from the ground to ensure its purity and to mint it into a known size.

Jack Spirko [01:09:23] It was the energy input, all the manual labor, all of the like government, government backing to the point of not really like government fiat, but government creating mitts and saying, if it's stamped this way and the edge looks like this, you know, it's one 10 ounce of silver, it's a quarter ounce of gold or whatever it was. So it's actually the same thing. And that's, that's why I think we have some bad terms. And I don't mean they're bad. I mean they're probably not the best or most accurate terms in Bitcoin like mining. That's why we have, that's why Satoshi created the term mining for it. It it's really not mining. It's verifying. It's verifying and minting. But that doesn't sound like what he was trying to convey. He, she, they, whoever they worked, right? That this was about like, because I had to take a resource, plug it into an outlet and pay for that energy. 'cause back in the beginning you could do this with a laptop. Today we have these ASIC computers that are, they're built for one thing and one thing only. And people say it's mining. They're really built for security. That's the magic of Bitcoin, is it security and it's unstoppable. So if I wanna store my wealth, my surplus wealth, my capital right then I wanna store it in the most pristine form of capital that we have. And I would say the capital that when the United States decides to sanction your country, you don't give a shit that's pristine capital. When you can't stop me from doing business with somebody in Japan that's pristine capital. When someone can simply say, nope, click.

Jack Spirko [01:10:54] And I can't exchange the value that I worked for. That's not pristine capital. So when you wanna talk about something that's backed by nothing, that's the US dollar in every modern fiat currency, they're backed by nothing but your faith. And that's why your government will build giant nuclear submarines and enforce the petrodollar because if your faith leaves it, it's dead. It's gone. There's no way to bring it back. And I do believe they will reboot the monetary system and we about the collapse of our, our our our dollar or whatever. This has already happened multiple times. 1913 was a default. It was a default. That's what it really was, was the fault. The crime of 1873 where they demonetized silver was a default on US currency. 1933 was a default on US currency. 1964 where they de demonetized silver out of our change was a default on the dollar 1971 where they closed the gold window was a default. So people think collapse or default always equals the end. What it equals as a shift. So you have like the Peter Schiff Ikes that rec, I mean they are great at recognizing the problem and their view is, well eventually this will come to an end. And I agree with them and here's why. And I agree with their reasoning and so we'll have to go back to gold. Well gold has its own props. We, we, we opened up with that Charles Dega setting boats to pick it up. Think about moving not the 50 bucks. I might pay you for a consulting fee or something or you know, I don't know what ad spot for $200.

Jack Spirko [01:12:28] Think about trying to move $50 million between here and Tokyo. You need airplanes, you need men with guns. It's gonna cost you $5 million and numerous approvals to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:12:42] And once the gold changes hands, you still gotta check it 'cause you don't actually know if it's gold or if it's iron covered up by, you know, gold paint.

Jack Spirko [01:12:52] Now let's say that for some reason I wanna leave my home country. I won't even say it's American and I won't even say where I'm going 'cause it's irrelevant, it doesn't matter. And I wanna leave and I have $5 million worth of Bitcoin. Do you know what I take with me 12 words in my head if I'm smart, I do a little bit more than that for insurance purposes, but that's all I really need. I don't even have to move wherever I go. I have access. So this is the other thing like people don't understand about Bitcoin. You don't own any Bitcoin, you don't have any Bitcoin. This is a hardware wallet so that my Bitcoin can't be hashed 'cause it's only

Vance Crowe [01:13:24] Accessible. Ah, your treasure guy, eh,

Jack Spirko [01:13:26] Right? Yeah. It's only accessible when it's connected and only for as long as I need it connected is how long it's connected. When I have that you, I don't need anything to be portable with my wealth and I don't own it. And while least another one of those terms, like mining isn't a great term, wallet's not a great term. Wallets, we put money in that wallet has no Bitcoin inside it. If if you have a ring doorbell and somebody's trying to break in your house and you look in your phone and you see them on your porch and you turn your speakers on and go, Hey asshole, get off my porch. And they run away. They weren't in your phone. Your phone was an access tool to get to the camera that was filming them. They existed on the porch. Your Bitcoin exists on the blockchain that is a signing device that gives you access to specific satoshis on the blockchain that allows you to move them around and sign transactions. Now that's, I understand why you just call it a wallet. 'cause if I'm trying to onboard somebody and I say that to them, they, I they're done. But if you wanna understand it, that's the next level of understanding it. It it's all within this thing we call a blockchain. And blockchains like, so in the, in the teens we were coming through and they started that whole mantra of blockchain, not Bitcoin. Oh

Vance Crowe [01:14:43] Yeah. All that bullshit, right? Any, anytime somebody says that to you, they do not know what they're talking about. Just go discount everything else they say after that. No,

Jack Spirko [01:14:51] No, that's fourth grade marketing, right? That's fourth grade level marketing, right? That's exactly what it is. And so blockchains are slow and contentious on purpose because security above all has to be married with decentralization. It's very easy to build a secure network, okay? It's very easy to build a decentralized network doing the two together. That's complicated. That's complicated. It's also very difficult to improve a network that's decentralized and that's the beauty of Bitcoin. You wanna change the you unique consensus and that's why we have all these layer two, layer three solutions coming for Bitcoin now. Like the lightning network, like cashew e cash, right? And and like some of these layer two apps that are using lightning like fountain where like I'm sure your podcast is available there and what have you, right? That's why we're building this. 'cause base chain is difficult to change and it should be. So the idea that you want a blockchain into something that doesn't need a high degree of security, plus a high degree of, of being contentious is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. If you're a company, you don't need a blockchain, you have a central network, your company controls it, why would you want a blockchain for an intranet? Which is the way these people were talking and then that takes like 90% of the shit coins in their use cases is throw 'em

Vance Crowe [01:16:11] In the track. Oh, 99% I know. And the, and the the snake oil salesman that'll come along and tell you like, oh, we've got this new defi thing and we're gonna do this stable coin bullshit. The thing that is so fascinating, you did an excellent job describing Bitcoin. I've never heard it like that. And I think it was, it was very, very good. One of the things that I heard recently was that, you know, gold is stuck in the ground, but you can go mine that and if you,

Jack Spirko [01:16:38] If

Vance Crowe [01:16:38] There's an incentive for you to go mine faster, put more, more things to chip away at it, then you can go get more gold out it it right now it inflates at about 2% per year. But correct, Bitcoin is frozen in time and that is, it cannot be released without that time. And that blockchain is exactly what that time is. Those miners are,

Jack Spirko [01:17:01] That's the contentious portion, right? That's the contentious portion of

Vance Crowe [01:17:05] It. And this is what makes it so brilliant is that unlike a government system where they can just print money whenever they want, whenever they think, Hey, we need more money for this war or 'cause we want to go give it to this other country, or you know, for whatever reason they want, they can't do that. And with Bitcoin, everybody is like, has to wait until those Bitcoin are released and Yep. And by making it contentious, everybody's in competition. So those miners get stronger and stronger and stronger to try and get those little Bitcoin that are coming out about every 10 minutes. And the stronger that they get each one individual getting stronger makes the whole network stronger, which is what makes this system so mind boggling. It's, it's one of those things that you never stop learning about Bitcoin. Like I, I've been in this nut quite as long as you, but I can say that every single day, every single week I'm listening to stuff on Bitcoin, I'm like, oh man, I I never thought about it like that before. Yep,

Jack Spirko [01:18:01] Yep. I think every story in the world today has a Bitcoin angle as part of it. But where you're coming from then, like if I want more gold, I need more Komatsu and I need more pits with acid in them to separate the gold from the rock and I need to move more tons of earth. And if gold goes to $10,000, we will have instantly more Komatsu and more holes and more acid pits. And for anybody talks about the environmental impact of, of, of Bitcoin, you have no idea what you're talking about. First of all, every single website that you visit that's sitting on Amazon Web services AWS uses more energy than freaking Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, don't get me wrong. It uses a lot of surplus and otherwise lost energy as well because miners naturally seek out to, to locate their mining operations as close to possible the power generation. And if you wanna talk about electricity and energy at all, solar panels, wind, I don't care what it is and you can't tell me what impedance and attenuation are without Google shut up, you don't get an opinion, you don't understand loss and energy, right? You don't, you're not a bad person. You just don't know. Right? So when, when we do that, we're actually, do you know that Christmas lights in America use more electricity than the global, global Bitcoin network?

Vance Crowe [01:19:10] No, I didn't know that

Jack Spirko [01:19:11] One of those dryers globally use more energy than the Bitcoin networks. I'm not saying it's cost free, it has to have a Cox but also now we have people developing renewable energy because they can, because they can sell all the power they would've lost had they not done that. So it, it actually makes everything better. It is not an answer to every problem. It is a big piece of an answer to a lot of problems. And if we can eventually get to a Bitcoin standard, and I believe we can, we can go back to having hard money be the governor of governments. Wars were heavily limited in the past because you couldn't just print, basically when you make a thousand new Abrahams tanks, you didn't make a thousand new Abrams tanks. You printed money to pay for a thousand new Abrams tanks

Vance Crowe [01:20:02] And you didn't actually print that money. You sucked the value out of everybody's bank accounts and all of the money that they have everywhere else.

Jack Spirko [01:20:10] Yep. Yeah. Like you gotta look at like if you're holding your wealth in dollars and you've had an access device to your dollars, just like an access de device for Bitcoin, you have to look at it in the best case scenario, it's leaking 2% per year. And that's, if you believe the number that's designed to lie to you, in the best case scenario, you're looking at more like four point a 5%. And over the last five years they say inflation is like 25% cumulative and combined bullshit. It's more like 20% per annum in real effect. Because there's two sides to this system, fractional reserve system. It's not just governments. In fact it's not even the government that prints money. It's banks, it's banks and they print it at the national level. But the real places, they print it and they create what's called velocity of money and which is how fast it moves and how fast it grows is with you the same person you're stealing from, you're using to print money. When you go to a bank and you say, I wanna buy this house for $300,000 and let's say you, that doesn't include your, your down payment separate. So the amount of money you want from bank's, 300 grand and you think that the bank takes $300,000 and gives it to you. They do not, they do not have the $300,000 they have a reserve against which they can lend. And people think that 10% reserve, which isn't even a thing anymore. But let's best case scenario again. So that would mean that if I wanna loan you 300,000 that I I could, I have to have 300,000 plus 10% and I can load you the 300,000 and hold to 10%.

Jack Spirko [01:21:42] No. If I have the 10%, I can loan you to 300,000. If I have 30, I can loan you 300. It's the other way around. And your promise to repay the loan and your credit worthiness allows that bank to write a check to you that you then give to the seller of the home that the money didn't exist until the second they wrote the check. The banks are printing money at the consumer and they're doing it with your credit cards are the same way.

Vance Crowe [01:22:06] And then your

Jack Spirko [01:22:07] Credit card.

Vance Crowe [01:22:08] And then whenever that guy takes that $300,000 check that he got for that house, he puts it in a bank and now their reserves go up by 300,000. So now they can loan out 3 million.

Jack Spirko [01:22:19] Correct? Correct. And it just keeps going. So we have this massive inflation that people don't even see. And then the other side of that is the interest rate. So if you can't really calculate inflation unless you include the total cost of housing, which we do not the total cost of food, which we do not the total cost of credit, which we do not in that CPI number. So yes, the house that I bought for $200,000, what, 10, 11 years ago, today's worth half a million. That's, that's $300,000 of inflation on the cost of a mortgage. But I have a mortgage rate of 2.8%. Even if I, this house did not go up in value, what's it gonna cost you to buy it if I sell it to you versus what it cost me to buy it, you're gonna pay a 7% interest rate. You're, you're gonna pay a payment on this house that I couldn't have afforded when I bought this house. That's what's gonna happen to you, right? So we left all those numbers out and again, there's the, the phrase Bitcoin, I'm sure you've heard it, Bitcoin fixes this well, Bitcoin fixes that, but the world isn't doing it yet. And this is one of the rare opportunities in my opinion, where the consumer still has the ability to front run the institutions. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:23:31] I

Jack Spirko [01:23:31] Mean even though we have BlackRock involved, like if nothing else is like it's not now this whole bullshit about it's gonna go to zero, they're gonna ban, it's gonna go away. Once BlackRock has their finger on that, I hate them, but they get shit done. It ain't going nowhere. It's the most successful ETF that's ever been launched and it's only like five months old. Like the, the gold ETF was incredibly successful when they released first gold ETF. It's, it's nothing compared to the, the release of the Bitcoin ETF and now you've got Van Act, BlackRock et all going, every Karen and human resources going, you really need our ETF and your 401k plan and you've got pension fund managers that are managing pensions for teachers that are managing pensions for city workers and firemen and police officers that are now putting, you know, a quarter percent of their pension fund into this. You'll screw as a politician with an Indian reservation before you mess with the retirement of teachers and firefighters and police officers. So if there, if you were waiting for a signal that this was gonna be around for a while, there it is. And I know what people say, but wait, it's something like $60,000 now. And that's what you said when it was 600 and that's when you said, well it was 66,000 and that's when you said, well it was 20,000 and sooner or later maybe you, you get this. And the one piece of advice I'll give people is buy and never sell. I have sitting upstairs in my, my, my gun safe, a 65 60 $6,000 shotgun in real cost because I bought a shotgun for $600 with, with one Bitcoin, one Bitcoin was 600.

Jack Spirko [01:25:10] And I don't hate it, but I don't love that it either,

Vance Crowe [01:25:13] Right?

Jack Spirko [01:25:14] This was back really early on and I was doing referrals for Coinbase and I was getting like 0.1 Bitcoin for everybody that signed up in the very early days. So I had lots of Bitcoin, I wish I still had all that Bitcoin. So I'm saying don't sell it. And there was a guy and he had this beautiful pre-war browning, a five little bit of ding on it and all but just a beautiful gun and it was probably worth 1500 bucks. And we were doing a barter exchange, barter blanket with a whole group at an event. And I'm like, this guy kept talking about wanting to get into Bitcoin, wanting to get into Bitcoin. I'm like, I know it's worth more, but I'll give you one Bitcoin and I'll set you up with a wallet and teach you how to use it. And he's like, deal. So I bought a $1,500 shotgun for 600 bucks and what I should have done was, 'cause I'd have given him 600 cash, I should have took 600 cash the next day and bought a a Bitcoin with it. But so if you do spend it right, you're now, that was before we had tax guidance and stuff like that too. Now we got tax. Now you're creating a taxable event when you do this. So if you do like the other party wants Bitcoin, buy it and send it to 'em off the exchange, right? Then there's no tax consequence really because you're actually gonna lose a little money with the fee. So if you want to record it, then you write it off as a loss. Do not, not de minimus stuff. Little small amounts on a lightning network. You know, I play around on noster value for value on podcast networks and stuff like that. That's, that's fine. But when you're talking about significant amount of spending, like you need to look at everything you spend today. Once you understand Bitcoin, what would it be worth tomorrow if I didn't do it? I don't care if it's cash, right? Because the cash that you spend, you could have bought Bitcoin with.

Vance Crowe [01:26:47] It's the first time in my lifetime with that, that you actually have an option that's not gambling in the stock market. It's not where you're like, here I'm gonna hand this to a bunch of managers of a company that they're gonna make all the decisions they want, do whatever they want with it, which is fine. That's just, that's just the way that it is. But that you can say, Hey, if I didn't spend that money, I could have put it here and it would go up in value because the demand for it is gonna be so much higher. I

Jack Spirko [01:27:11] And they can't you new shares, right? That's the, that's the game in the market. You just issue new stickers, you buy some back, you issue new ones, you play with the supply.

Vance Crowe [01:27:20] So right now if people said, you know what, I'm just gonna do the thing of buying, you know, a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin, where would you send them?

Jack Spirko [01:27:29] Probably Swan or Strike I love Strike for, that's a small amount. Strike is really good for that. The problem with Strike is you often have verification problems and they don't seem to have a great customer service solution to that yet. So what'll happen is someone will try to link their bank account or just set the account up or whatever and they'll get denied and they go into like abysmal hell of trying to get a solution. But you know, when I signed up for it, everything just worked. So if it works for those small purchases, I would say Strike, which is Jack Mailer's company. And if you wanted to do larger purchases or even the small ones, Swan is great, Swan is Bitcoin, so Strike, they're both Bitcoin only right now at, at Swan, if you sign up, you get no fees on your first $10,000 of purchases and you can even set up Swan or like you have an automatic deposit, direct deposit from your, from your paycheck where you can just go, go to Karen and Human Resources and get a second direct deposit thing and say I want 10% of my paycheck to go to this account instead of my bank account. And then you can have automatic purchases set up in SWAN and automatic withdrawals. So I can't get into how, but there's ways in a Bitcoin wallet to create a series of addresses if you don't want 'em all to go to the same address and then it will just every month say take a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin and Depo and put it into your wallet, right? And do that for you. They're big on self custody, they have great customer support. So if you want to do more than that, I would really look hard at Swan.

Jack Spirko [01:29:01] Yeah, my and you should go to Bitcoin breakout.com and click on tools and use my link. So I make a buck.

Vance Crowe [01:29:06] Oh great. I I yeah, you'll send me the link. We'll put it in the show notes. I, yeah, I'm a big fan of saying, even if you think Bitcoin is bullshit, just go buy a hundred dollars worth and get it off the exchanges and by the time the you get it off the exchange, you will know, you will understand it in a much, much deeper way.

Jack Spirko [01:29:24] So the one thing I'll say about getting off the exchange is the fees on on chain transactions are fairly high right now and have been for quite a while. This is one of the things, the shit coins attack with this. And again, it's another feature, not a bug. So if you're buying on exchange, it to me makes sense to kind of get that balance up to 500 to a thousand bucks and then do your withdrawal because the fee's not really a percentage. It's a, it's a cost per, per, per the data used. And when you do it that way, you're gonna end up paying a much lower fee and losing less of what you want to acquire. But if you want j just like you're saying to understand and

Vance Crowe [01:30:02] Consider there something super powerful about that 15 I, it's, I've I've done it with a bunch of people where, where we've walked it through, yeah. And then they get a treasure wallet and you know, treasure may not be the best wallet that's out there, but it's super user friendly. Once you've done it once, now you're not gonna need to be talked into this. You're not gonna need to have somebody hold your hand. Now you're gonna be like, oh, I get it and now I'm gonna walk down that path. And I think that's the most important thing is just get on the path

Jack Spirko [01:30:27] And you can start somebody out with a software wallet until they have enough money to make it worth the purchase of a hardware wallet. And one of the best things you can do with that is get 'em set up with a software wallet on one, you know, mobile device, computer, whatever, and have 'em set that wallet up, walk 'em through, buying 5,000 bucks, transferring it over, then go to another device, teach 'em how to back up a seed phrase, have 'em install that wallet on that other device and do a restore with that seed phrase. And that's when the light bulb goes,

Vance Crowe [01:30:56] Oh yeah, yeah, that, that, that, these 12 words were all I needed. So the, the I, I'll just throw this out there. There's a guy on YouTube that goes by BTC sessions and he really has done a very excellent job of doing ev I mean I probably learned most of what I know by watching his YouTube, YouTube videos and, and that he continues to update 'em. Well Jack, I could do this. You and I are, are a kindred spirits. I have absolutely loved this. If people wanted to check out your podcast and kinda track what you're doing, where would you send them? So

Jack Spirko [01:31:27] I would tell you go to the survival podcast.com and if you're like, damn Jack, that's too many letters, tspc.co will relocate to there for you and you can find my entire catalog of content goes back to 2008. In fact, we are sitting here on my anniversary 16 years, June 20th oh eight was when I started the show. And you can go all the way back and listen to episode one. I'll just tell you the audio is crap 'cause it was in my car with a little recorder. And you can use the search feature or the tag cloud and find content on anything in a self-sufficiency, self-reliance, independence and liberty world if you really like this. Last part of this conversation was on Bitcoin. It's my least popular subject with my audience. I got a lot of very primitive minded people and stuff. And you're trusting your wealth to a light switch and whatever. That's fine. So what I did for my Bitcoin content about three years ago, I started doing a thing called Bitcoin breakout where it still goes in my regular feed, but it also goes in a standalone feed. And you can go to the Bitcoin breakout.com and you'll find just my content on Bitcoin. It's nowhere near with the regularity. Probably do one episode a month of that. But I also have a foundational series there where you can start in episode one and the, the beginning of it is like the onboard experience to learn how, what is mining, what is mining, what is 'cause mining is the way you, what is hash? What is Shaw, what is Shaw 2 56? How does it actually work? There's actually tools where you can play with it and you can see it function in front of you at a very low speed so you can understand it. So I walk people all the way through that and I have a a a a tab on that site called Tools and it's where you're asking exchanges, et cetera, you know who you'd use and why and you'll see a legacy thing on there with Ledger mention.

Jack Spirko [01:33:11] It says don't use it and we don't need to really explain to people just don't use Ledger.

Vance Crowe [01:33:15] Well

Jack Spirko [01:33:15] I'm sure you know why,

Vance Crowe [01:33:16] Jack, I, I am, I knew this was gonna be a good conversation but it actually was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jack Spirko [01:33:25] Yeah man, thanks a lot for having me and if you ever wanna talk again, lemme know.